Tag: conference

‘See me. Feel me. Touch me.’ (Pt. 1)

Object lessons and reflections on the HEA Arts & Humanities conference 2016

Brighton-HEA3

Early March. Brighton is an alluring place, despite the chill in the air.  The sun is shining, the sea is blue, the promenade and beach lie temptingly just across the road from the conference venue, and the esoteric shops, cafés and bars of The Lanes are just a couple of minute’s walk away. So it was a testament to the commitment of the participants and the quality of the many and varied sessions on offer that so many were able to resist the temptation to ‘skip school’.

While, in some sessions and in Jonathan Worth’s fascinating keynote on the second day, there was an inevitable and valuable focus on the digital and the virtual, the most powerful message – for me – was the extraordinary pedagogic power of the physical, tangible object. From Kirsten Hardie’s opening keynote with accompanying green plastic teapot, pineapple ice bucket and toilet brush, to the Lego sessions of Contemplative Pedagogies, by way of Simon Heath’s wonderful drawings (see image below) that captured the essences of the whole event, it was the object that held centre stage. And there were plenty more sessions that focused on making and doing as a pedagogic activity, not just a practical or physical one.

Photo left: Hannah Cobb @ArchaeoCobb

 

I have written elsewhere (‘On history and all that’ ) on the power of objects to engage the imagination, to generate stories and lines of enquiry, to provoke philosophical, political, ethical debates, and to provide learning experiences that really ‘stick’. I still recall clearly the ‘History of Decoration’ seminars from my art student days when ‘Simi’ (Ms. Simeon the lecturer) would enliven her lectures on, say, Ancient Egypt, by taking a vase or piece of jewellery or some other artefact out of the cardboard box she always brought. She would casually hand the object to someone to examine and then pass around the room with the words ‘Do try to be careful, dear, that’s three and half thousand years’ old’. This would be repeated every session, whether the topic was Ancient Rome (jewellery), Medieval Europe (a crucifix) or Tudor England (a lace ruff). I only realised what we had been passing round  when I heard that, on her death , Simi’s large collection of “just something to look at while I’m talking” had been bequeathed to and enthusiastically accepted by the V&A museum.

What also became clear during the conference, is that ‘object lessons’ are not just the preserve of the creative arts community. Every discipline clearly has its associated artefacts which can be used not only to enhance the teaching of an ‘academic’ subject, but to act as foci for the characteristics and qualities of the sort of learning that Kirsten Hardie talked about: learning that engages, amazes, provokes, exhilarates, takes risk, liberates.

imageOne of the things I remember from those, now distant, art history sessions is something I frequently refer to in my work on curriculum design and assessment. In one her first seminars, Simi passed round an Ancient Greek vase that was covered head to foot in decoration. The reason, she said, for filling every possible square inch was ‘horor vacui’ – fear of open space – because it was through open space that the ‘Evil Eye’ enters the world. That might well be one of the reasons (though I would avoid mentioning the ‘Evil Eye’ or the Devil in module specifications and handbooks) why we insist on filling our curricula with content: ‘Idle hands make the devil’s workshop’ and all that. But we also know that deep learning, creativity and innovation require time and space to incubate and develop.

Objects, importantly, enable us to slow down time: to observe, to really look, to touch, to feel, to explore. Simon Piasecki, at the conference, talked about how he gets his performance students to slow right down and focus on the minutiae of what they are doing, and the artist Marina Abramovich – one of whose concerns is the fact that we don’t stop to really look any more –  has a number of exercises she uses with those who come to view her work to achieve the same slowing down. When I worked at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (LIPA), one of the first year ‘options’ that I established – open to any student – was a traditional life-drawing class. All the students that participated in that quiet, contemplative two hours on a Wednesday evening, amidst an extraordinarily hectic timetable (‘horor vacui’!), reported that they understood that it wasn’t about being able to draw. It was about having the time and space to slow down and really observe not only the ‘object’ (usually another student) but also themselves….and to ‘take a line for a walk’ in Paul Klee’s famous phrase.

Ken Robinson, in his now famous TEDTalk on creativity and education, jokes about academics generally seeing their bodies as a form of transportation to get them to meetings. He, among others, stresses the importance of mind and body, the intellectual and the emotional, the psychological and the physiological. What came through so strongly at the HEA Arts and Humanities conference was that objects – in all their glorious variety – and our close interactions with them, provide a means to engage powerfully in deep, meaningful learning experiences.  Objects both inhabit space and create space. We just need the space,  the time and, impotently, the confidence to engage in our own object lessons.

Brighton- HEA2

Photos by Paul Kleiman unless otherwise stated
Conference Twitter hashtag: #HEAArts16

Musings on a ‘monsterous’ conference call

Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness. . .

(Ted Hughes, “The Thought-Fox”)

 

In the wake of the recent announcement and call for contributions for the HEA’s Arts & Humanities ‘Heroes and Monsters” conference, there have been a number of posts and blogs on various sites wrestling with what the call is actually about!One that caught my eye was by Susan Deacy.

Dr. Deacy writes “The particulars make clear that the event is looking for ways to challenge current ways of learning and teaching to ‘make strange’ academic practice and challenge what is taken for granted by its practitioners. On the conference’s definition, monsters dwell in realms just beyond our own; they can come into our world to ‘unnerve’ us and ‘innervate’ us, and thus a ‘monstrous pedagogy’ can ‘disrupt habits’ and ‘articulate…different ways of being’. But who are ‘we’?”

There is a strong implication in the conference description, that ‘we’ are the ones who are disrupted and unnerved. But ‘we’ are, or can be, or may wish to be also the monsters and/or heroes (heroic monsters? monstrous heroes?). The teacher as Theseus and/or the Minotaur?

What has struck me in recent weeks (and, before I proceed further, I need to declare my interest as a member of the HEA’s Arts and Humanities team) is that I have newly encountered and had conversations about not just our own ‘Heroes & Monsters’ conference, but also the influence of Punk and the punk aesthetic in learning and teaching (did you know there’s an active group of scholars called Punkademics?); the establishment of a university Centre for Gothic Studies; and a course entitled Vampire Studies.

I do wonder, as the significant pressures of standardisation, marketisation, consumerisation, etc. in higher education bear increasingly down on us (then again, who are ‘we’?), whether this is a form of resistance.

But we don’t resist change, per se. We resist loss, and we replace that loss not with the known, the common, the understood, the accepted. We replace it with ‘the other’ or, better, ‘an other’: one that has genuine meaning in an environment in which so many things have become de-referentialised, that strikes a chord, that ‘chimes with the times’.

It is also no accident that the ‘Heroes and Monsters’ conference call connects directly with the allure and fascination of the myth and the quest. As I’ve got a book chapter to write on key aspects of teaching and learning in dance, drama and music, I’ll end (I may return, hauntingly) as I began, with Ted Hughes, and this in his essay ‘Myth and Education’:

“The myths for [Plato] were not very different from what they are for us, imaginative exercises about life in a world full of supernatural figures and miracles that never happened, never could happen. Yet these, he suggested, were the ideal grounding for the future wise and realistic citizen. We can imagine what would happen if we proposed now that all education in England up to the school age of 11 be abolished and there be put in its place a huge system of storytelling.

If we think of that we can see how far the wisdom in our educational system differs from what Plato would have called wisdom. Our school syllabus of course is one outcome of 300 years of rational enlightenment, which had begun by questioning superstitions and ended by prohibiting imagination itself as a reliable mental faculty, branding it more or less as a criminal in the scientific society. And what this has ended in is a completely passive attitude of apathy in face of material facts. The scientific attitude, which is the crystallisation of the rational attitude, has to be passive in the face of the facts if it is to record the facts accurately.

Such is the prestige of the scientific style of mind that this passivity in the face of the facts, this detached, inwardly inured objectivity, has become the prevailing mental attitude of our time. It is taught in schools as an ideal.

The result is something resembling mental paralysis”.